Global Investment and Competition Across the Telecommunication Industry

Christopher Barclay1


1 School of International Service, American University

Introduction

Volumes have written upon the relationship between industry competition and consumer welfare. Economists generally agree that competition tends to lower consumer prices and provide customers with more options. In United States v. AT&T (1982) the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the telecommunications monopoly AT&T into seven smaller ‘baby Bell’ companies; this was possibly the biggest governmental action to break up corporate market power in U.S. history. As a result, telecommunications technology proliferated and prices were lowered. The battles to regulate, or deregulate, the telecommunications industry left lasting impressions upon the nascent regulation of the Internet (e.g., the deregulatory “Telecommunication Act of 1996”) and advanced telecommunications.

This research paper investigates contemporary competition in the telecommunications industry, asking several questions:

  • How does the level of competition in the telecommunications industry vary across different countries?”

  • Is there any correlation between the level of competition and factors such as investment in telecommunications, ease of business, and economic strength?

  • Are there any striking differences in level of competition among sub-industries (e.g., mobile, internet services, cable tv)?

Using data from the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), I perform simple correlation and multivariate regression analyses to provide tentative insight into global telecommunication competition. Future research could incorporate data regarding annual foreign investment in the telecommunications industry, government efficiency, level of corruption, and other variables

Data and Methodology

The ‘telecom.csv’ dataset contains economic data from 1960-2022 across 218 countries, 18 sub-industries, and 11 ease of business indicators. Data regarding annual investment in telecommunication services and level of competition were taken from the ITU’s “DataHub. Historical data on ease of business were taken from The World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ archive. Lastly, data on economic strength were taken from the IMF’s public datasets on (GDP, current prices and GDP per capita, current prices, respectively.

Table 1: Global Telecom Competition (2022)
Level of Competition Freq Percent
Full competition 863 91.516437
Partial competition 46 4.878049
Monopoly 34 3.605514

Results

## 
## ================================================================
##                                          Dependent variable:    
##                                      ---------------------------
##                                       annual_telecom_invest_bil 
## ----------------------------------------------------------------
## competition_levelMonopoly                     -3.004***         
##                                                (0.373)          
##                                                                 
## competition_levelPartial competition           0.937**          
##                                                (0.373)          
##                                                                 
## Constant                                      3.534***          
##                                                (0.135)          
##                                                                 
## ----------------------------------------------------------------
## Observations                                   20,673           
## ================================================================
## Note:                                *p<0.1; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01
Table 2: Table caption.
Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2
4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2
4.6 3.1 1.5 0.2
5.0 3.6 1.4 0.2
5.4 3.9 1.7 0.4
4.6 3.4 1.4 0.3
5.0 3.4 1.5 0.2
4.4 2.9 1.4 0.2
4.9 3.1 1.5 0.1

Or with figures: Figure 1, or Figure 2.

Great figure!

Figure 1: Great figure! 

data <- iris

plot(x = data$Sepal.Length, 
     y = data$Sepal.Width, 
     col = data$Species,
     pch = 19, 
     xlab = "Sepal Length (cm)",
     ylab = "Sepal Width (cm)")
Amazing, right?!

Figure 2: Amazing, right?!

Next Steps

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Conclusion

Try posterdown out! Hopefully you like it!

Contact

Please contact this author at

References

Thorne, Brent. 2019. Posterdown: Generate PDF Conference Posters Using r Markdown. https://github.com/brentthorne/posterdown.